For all of you sales leaders out there,
here is an excerpt from CEOMarc Benioff's book "Behind the Cloud." Here, Marc
dips into The Sales Playbook and offers us a look at telesales effectiveness.

In
this war against the software industry model, our marketing team was our
Air Force, providing the high-level air cover necessary to blanket the zone
with our message. It was the mission of the sales force to conduct the
one-on-one combat on the ground. The truth is that many of the techniques
initially employed by the sales team weren’t innovative, but we found that
investing time and demonstrating tenacity were simple and effective selling
strategies.

This
was still the era of the dot-com brouhaha, and I was invited to several parties
every night. I would speak with a large number of people and collect business
cards from everyone. The next morning, I would give the stack of cards to the
sales team and urge them to contact the leads immediately. They hated it. They
tried to hide as they saw me walk down the hallway, but luckily the office was
a big open space, and there was nowhere for them to go. I also encouraged the
team to call everyone they knew and to routinely ask friends of friends for
referrals. Those friends sometimes got aggravated, but we got users. They were
my favorite kind of users because the leads were free!

When
salesforce.com was founded, there was a preconceived notion that you could not
sell CRM applications over the phone. Companies were investing massive amounts
in building high-touch teams that operated in far-flung offices. We broke that
mold—mostly because we couldn’t afford to follow it in the traditional way—and
proved that telesales could win a high close rate at one-third the cost and in
one-third the amount of the time as the traditional selling model.

Although
our approach is similar to what other companies might call telesales, we called
it our “corporate sales” model and found that recruits responded more
positively to that term. We built the corporate sales team with recent
graduates from great colleges who were terrific at answering the incoming
calls. These individuals were smart and energetic, and were closing sales
without much training. We also built a team of more experienced “outbound
sales” reps who were calling out and closing deals. We offered an extensive
training boot camp and gave sales reps three to six months to build a pipeline.
(They were then expected to close business, and those who didn’t perform were
moved elsewhere.)

Customers
were curious about the lack of a face-to-face meeting at first, but soon they
appreciated the calls and web demos as effective time-savers for everyone. This
practice would become more relevant later, when the economy faltered and all
corporations slashed their travel budgets and began communicating via web
conferencing and conference calls. Although we did not predict the shift, our
strategy, born of necessary frugality, prepared us to take advantage of it. As
technology advances with better web conferencing tools and new and less
expensive ways to connect people more easily, this is the best way for any
company to get its sales team up and running.

Outline for a Sales Call: The Top Five Points for
a Winning Conversation